Ever wonder why politicians and activists say the things they do? And if it has anything to do with psychology and how our brains work? The answer is yes, and yes. People are playing with our minds on a daily basis.
Brains have only two modes: autopilot and deep thinking. Most of our time is spent on autopilot, acting out pre-programmed responses to everyday events. Deep thinking is only activated when something new has to be assessed. Nature’s idea was to operate minds like a computer with cache memory—keep all the commonly used stuff readily available and only go to disk for hard calculations. But there’s a catch. Deep thinking takes loads of mental energy and not everyone can do it.
Nature’s theory was to use autopilot to store the results from deep thinking. For example, if you spend months analyzing something like nutrition, your findings get loaded into autopilot for daily use (e.g., what to have for breakfast). But because we’re naturally lazy (averse to mental efforts), everything in our autopilots isn’t always well thought out. And that’s how they make us do and say some pretty dumb stuff. Here is one example.
Abortion
They tell us abortion is a women’s issue. Is it? If you attend a pro-choice or pro-life rally, you’ll find equal numbers of men and women on either side. But if this were a gender issue, wouldn’t you expect mostly women at the pro-choice and predominantly men at the pro-life? You don’t because this isn’t something between women and men, it’s about religion.
In the olden days, abortion was deemed socially unacceptable because it was against church practice. Catholics, for example, still don’t allow birth control because of what they believe is the sanctity of life. As a result, old time abortions took place under unsafe, non-hospital conditions. Then a movement appeared for abortion to be treated as a regular medical procedure. Many Christians, both women and men, took to the opposition quoting scripture and their doctrine. Without getting into a discussion on ethics, the point is this: the right to safe medical abortion isn’t an issue between men and women. It’s mostly a fight over religion.
The only component that could be seen as gender-based is when the father wants to keep the baby and the mother does not. If in these situations, courts favoured men simply because they were guys, that would be discrimination. But these conditions were quickly resolved to favour the lady (and nobody had a problem with it).
And if you think further, since the pro-life argument centers on divinity being placed right inside of us, why is capital punishment still practiced in many religious countries and 27 US states? Isn’t that hypocritical?
Summary
Deep thinking involves intense effort by using forces like focus and concentration. Because of this, most of us do it sparingly—preferring the simplicity of autopilot. Social manipulators know all about nature and prey on it. As a result, much of our information doesn’t come from pure sources. Many speakers have a hidden agenda they try to sneak into our heads.
If you haven’t put sufficient energy into deriving a well thought out opinion, they’ll provide you one—exactly to their liking. But once you go deep on a few occasions, you’ll come to see speakers in a different light. Bottom line: don’t put much faith in things you haven’t thought through.
Note: the example above is not intended to make a statement. It was used because of its political implications. The American Left ties abortion to women’s rights. As in, “if you care about feminism, you must support abortion,” when in fact these are separate issues. The American Right then supports pro-life while insisting on capital punishment.